Apparently Corbyn's toast. No, his heart wasn't in remain, but he did as well as Sturgeon in Scotland, maybe better. No, no one has a clue as to who replaces him.

I am still trying to figure this complicated shit out, but apparently the intellectual artsy cosmo "Left" don't understand how surgically connected they are with the Conservative bankster City warmongering financial right. They get a pass, and believe they're clean. Life is a cabaret.

One of the big complaints against Corbyn is that he wouldn't get on stage with Cameron and campaign for remain. There is a picture of them together and Cameron is smiling and Corbyn looks like he is about to throw up.

Would be lovely to meet up with any of the commentariat in the area (fa, dq, nosflow, lurid and lourdes, Minivet, any others? And lurkers most welcome). I'll be free Monday early afternoon on but Tuesday evening and afternoon will be uncertain.

The reason his parliamentary party hate Corbyn has little to do with his politics. It is partly a deep personal loathing born from his 30 years on the back benches and the vicious little clique that he hangs with -- that and the undeniable fact that no party led by hims is going to win a national election. He is just fucking hopeless at convincing anyone that he should be put in charge of anything. If you want change or any effective resistance to the nasty gang of extremists who have orchestrated this disaster, dumping Corbyn is the first and very necessary step.

The second of Ogged's gifs captures very well the Corbyn approach to winning elections.

Also this means I'll only be able to book a place to stay when I know I have a seat on the plane. Very nerve-wracking indeed. I probably should have booked the flights myself but my professional pilot brother insisted this would be fine.

The video in 4 is really good. There's another one of Blyth interviewing the Greek dude...valafianakos (I made that up, partly) that's also excellent. They're both a little too self-consciously clever, but that's just theater criticism; they're smart guys who seem right to my untutored eye.

My schedule is a horror show until I get a brief filed on Wednesday, but please post details of any meet ups as I live in hope and would be lovely to see you in person Barry! And if you find yourself in actual SF, particularly near embarcadero or Montgomery stations, let me know as might be able to pop out for a coffee or some such.

It's useful up until Blyth gets into talking about "Trumpism" and is apparently of the belief that it's a "revolt against technocracy." I don't think he grasps what "Trumpism" is at all. Neo-fascism and/or proto-fascism is never a "revolt against technocracy" (whether or not it exploits supposedly "anti-Establishment" sentiment), and anyone who isn't a total sap should be able to get that basic detail right.

That seems uncharitable to a spoken answer. Unless you think there's just no solution to flare-ups of xenophobia and racism, then you can look to how the things that lead to it have been managed. And if the technocrats have been in charge (that seems uncontroversial), you can see the current flare-up as a revolt against technocracy. I mean, I don't think people are mad *about* technocracy, but I understand what I think he meant to say.

I dunno. I think it should not be that hard, in spoken or written format, to differentiate racism exacerbated by circumstance or policy from actual revolts against bad policy decisions, and to not confuse the first with the second. Particularly true of Trumpism, which as much as anything is linked to white supremacist resentment of a Black President's ability to successfully correct for bad policy decisions, and become popular in so doing.

I, of course, disagree with LC and Moby, inchoately and ineffectively.

How American Politics Went Insane Jonathan Rauch. I skimmed it, too fucking long and a little bit middlin,' but I noticed this toward the end:"Disruption in politics and dysfunction in government reinforce each other. Chaos becomes the new normal."

I keep looking at Trump at a Scot golfcourse after a terrible week, and I keep looking at fucking Farage and Boris Johnson and this ain't your grandaddy's fascism, all Rudy Heydrich spit and polish.

This is killer clowns. Sersly.

I could spend too long elaborating this theory, but "Chaos becomes the new normal." is close enough, especially when my ideological gripping hand is batting away the flies. Nobody else can get a grip either, but this isn't anybody's fucking plan. It's a condition.

"I came from a working class Afro-Caribbean home where my grandparents arrived in north London around 1947 with only the clothes on their back. In this way I am the vindication of the liberal globalised meritocratic vision where each generation gets opportunities and climbs up the ladder so far that the memories of a grandfather being called a coon have faded into black and white pathe nothingness."

None of the monotheistic religions are very keen on trees. The Torah explains that trees are the source of all the evil in the world, the Bible includes an incident where Jesus gets pissed off at a tree and curses it for no obvious reason, and the Koran seems to think that trees will participate enthusiastically in the mass slaughter of Jews (though to be fair it regards this as a point in the trees' favour).

From my limited knowledge I would guess that Buddhism is probably the most pro-tree of the major faiths, because it was founded under one. But I'm prepared to believe that there are even more pro-tree faiths among the smaller animist religions.

57. Context, context. Here is a guy who is on the verge of launching a political provocation that he knows will almost certainly end with him being tortured to death, and very likely a lot of his friends too. He is hungry, he fancies a snack. Oh, look, a fruit tree! But there are no fruit on it? "Well, fuck you too, then!"

My apple trees never flowered this year, just went straight to leaves. But I think that's because a bunch of moths ate the initial buds and I didn't nuke them with pesticide until it was too late for the trees to flower. I guess you could consider it cursing the caterpillars when I was spraying them with Bt toxin.

On trees and Abrahamic monotheism, I thought Kaballah is big on trees, at least as metaphor?

I remember watching a sappy (pun intended) animated video in Catholic middle school about the crucifixion from the perspective of the tree that became the crucifix. In retrospect, holy shit that is weird and alarming.

Also, if ever you find yourself in tropical Asia and see at a fruit stall glistening piles of great big glossy figs, you are in fact seeing these things. Which are not without virtue, but are not figs either.

The best Brexit video is the one I posted of my cat falling and/or leaping enthusiastically (depending on your perspective) out of his cat tree hammock in pursuit of his toy mouse. He ends up on his feet, but without the mouse. It's an allegory for the ages, I tell you.

I think there was some connection between the Ogham alphabet and various trees, but it's hard to know what the mythic significance, if any, was because of the accreted layers of woo. ("Celtic tree ogham horoscope birth month" and similar bullshit.)

78: I thought that each Ogham character is named after a species of tree, and that's not woo, but anything more detailed than that is suspect. I thought that was also true of Germanic runes but upon looking it up I see that some characters are named after trees, but not all.

I have scuttled a poorly-planned overseas trip for this weekend because there is $0.00 available cash, and I am in such a bad mood over it, it's a little frightening. I yelled at my laptop Friday. I am still torturing myself over maybe finding a last-minute ticket for $800 more imaginary dollars. We could have a meetup during my forced staycation over the three-day weekend, but that would also cost money. Maybe I can hold a fucking bake sale. Is it possible to make lemon-ginger pastries that are good?

Lemon-ginger pastries sound so amazing it's hard to imagine ones that wouldn't be good! (I'm currently wasting a vacation day on a feverish and needy but not sleepy child. It is at least cheap, I suppose.)

My recollection is more like yours than the legends that Google is providing me. In my memory, it was the tree that decided it no longer wanted to grow straight and tall - not God who made the decision. (If you think about it, the version I remember makes more sense - after all, God made the tree in the first place, right?)